Posts Tagged ‘Colonialism’

I found this grimly fascinating snippet in today’s I for 22nd February 2019 on page 2, entitled ‘British pensioners on Hitler handouts’. It runs

Dozens of British pensioners are still receiving secret payments from Germany for collaborating with the Nazis, a group of Belgian MPs claim. They say the former collaborators, along with ex-SS guards, could be receiving up to £1,100 tax-free cash per month, thanks to a decree made by Hitler that was not revoked.

I can very well believe it. And how these Nazis and collaborators got here is a real scandal that the British secret state most definitely does not want the public to know about. They were recruited by the British intelligence agencies after the War, because they were believed to be useful in tackling the threat of Soviet espionage during the Cold War. I’ve got a feeling the West German secret service also recruited them for the same reason. This is probably also the reason why Hitler’s decree giving these horrors pensions was never revoked. And their presence in the West German intelligence agencies didn’t do them any good whatsoever. Markus Wolf, the head of the East German secret service still turned the West German spy agency into Swiss cheese.

Ken Livingstone discusses the scandal of the recruitment of former Nazis and their collaborators in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. He describes how some of them were giving jobs in the mining industry, and the disgust of the other miners at seeing them and their Nazi tattoos in the showers. Livingstone’s book, with its strong condemnation of any kind of racism, amply demonstrates that whatever Red Ken was, he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite. Indeed one Jewish blogger, who belonged to the Jewish Socialist Group, posted up a piece stating that the man Private Eye dubs ‘Leninspart’ drew the ire of the Board of Deputies on one occasion because he gave the Jewish Socialists a small grant. This angered the Board, which is in any case very Conservative establishment, because the Jewish Socialist Group were not affiliated to them and so were outside their control. They were, to quote another anti-Semitic trope ‘the wrong kind of Jews’. You know, not nice, cosy, right-wing Jews that are part of the British right-wing establishment. The other kind of Jews, all those awkward fellows from eastern Europe, who were into anarchism, socialism and Marxism. The kind of people in the Jewish Bund in Poland and the former Russian Empire, who wanted to live in their ancestral homelands in peace, friendship and equality with their gentile compatriots. The type of Jews the British Zionist establishment is trying to smear as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘self-hating’.

Livingstone called out these Nazis thirty years ago, which is probably one of the reasons the British establishment cordially hates him. And the Blairites and Israel lobby in the Labour party despise him because he dared to tell the truth about Israel: that the Zionists did collaborate with Hitler for a while to send Jewish colonists to Israel. And the Board despises anyone who does not automatically and uncritically support Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, just as they really despise genuinely socialist Jews.

It’s almost certainly true that British Nazis are receiving pensions from the Third Reich. And it’s a glaring scandal that they were ever recruited in the first place. Those pensions should be stopped, the British secret state’s recruitment of them should be made very public. And Livingstone and all the others, who have been unjustly smeared as anti-Semites should be readmitted into the party and duly given apologies.

This is a video posted on YouTube by the Sinn Fein senator, Niall O’Donghaile, of his speech in the Irish Senate last May demanding sanctions against Israeli and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador for Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Senator O’Donghaile pays due tribute to the efforts of the Dublin government to reach a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but he rejects this approach. He says it assumes that the conflict is between two equal countries, and that Israel is interested in diplomacy. They are not. And the bombing is not a one-off situation either. It is part of the continued genocide of the Palestinian people. He also says that the Americans would block any diplomatic attempt to end the Israeli action. He states that they know from their own history when to support diplomacy and when not. He therefore calls on the Irish government to boycott Israeli goods and follow South Africa’s example and expel the Israeli ambassador. He also states that, as Ireland has also suffered from imperialism and colonialism, they should stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

I realise that this going to be a controversial video, not least because of the speaker. I remember how Sinn Fein was the mouthpiece of the IRA during the Troubles and the carnage caused by Ulster terrorists. I am also very much aware that it was through efforts of Sinn Fein politicians like Gerry Adams that the Good Friday Agreement was reached and peace and normality returned to the Six Counties. A peace that remains fragile, and has been upset thanks to the breakdown of government at Stormont and Brexit, which threatens the open border to the South.

And I am also very much aware how desperate the Tories and their lackeys in the press and media have been to find any link between Jeremy Corbyn and Irish Republican terrorism, as well as Palestinian and Arab groups.

But Senator O’Donnghaile is right here, and his speech is a very statesmanlike summary of the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli state is not interested in a just and equitable peace. It is only interested in carrying through its decades long policy of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The speech also shows that I was correct in linking the Irish boycott of Israeli goods from the Occupied Territories with the Irish nationalist campaign against British imperialism. And possibly more closely than Mr. O’Donnghaile realizes. A few weeks ago Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a very long piece describing how Britain promoted and armed Saudi Arabia in the 1920s to attack and overthrow the traditional Arab and Muslim authority in the region because they would not support the region’s partition and continued to support the Palestinians against the nascent Jewish settlements. And it was very much about preserving and extending British power in the region.

After Ireland passed its BDS legislation, Netanyahu went on a predictable rant about them being anti-Semitic – they weren’t: Ireland still recognizes Israel and purchases Israeli goods. They just won’t purchase them if they’re made in the West Bank. The Israelis also called in the Irish ambassador for a telling off.

Senator O’Donnghaile says in his speech that Ireland is a small country on the world stage. Which is true. But as I pointed out in a previous post, Ireland has massive cultural cachet through its music and literature, especially in America and Australia, which have very strong Irish populations. In America the Irish formed a major constituency for the Democrats, at least in New York, while I understand that in Australia they were the backbone of the Labor Party. What Ireland says or does about an issue therefore carries weight far above the country’s economic or demographic figures.

I’m also very sure that Mr O’Donnghaile’s speech is what Israel fears the most, and why the Israel lobby has been so keen to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites. They are afraid of him standing up in parliament to make a speech like this, and of Britain also passing BDS legislation. Hence also Shai Masot’s shenanigans a year or so ago, where he took it upon himself to decide who should be in Theresa May’s cabinet, forcing Alan Duncan out because he was insufficiently loyal to Israel.

Unlike Ireland, Britain is a major economic power. Or we were up to the point the Tories decided to wreck it with their inept plans for Brexit. If we ban goods produced in the Occupied Territories, it will be a profound blow. And it would encourage more countries to begin criticizing Israel. And the Israeli state cannot tolerate that. We can expect more hysterical denunciations of decent people for anti-Semitism as the Israelis try to stop more people following Ireland’s example.

Before the deep political stuff, a piece of space news. According to yesterday’s I for 11th February 2019, NASA is planning to go back to the Moon and found permanently manned bases. The article by Clark Mindock, ‘NASA wants to station humans on the Moon’ on page 23 ran

NASA is planning to send astronauts to the Moon again, but this time it wants to keep them there.

The US space agency’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, called yesterday for “the best and brightest of American industry to help design and develop human lunar landers”, in response to what he said was a clear mandate from President Donald Trump and Congress to once again get astronauts out of Earth’s orbit.

In a post detailing Nasa’s lofty goals – to return astronauts to the Moon, and one day send them to Mars for the first time in human history – Mr Bridenstine said that the US was playing for keeps this time.

“I am thrilled to be talking once more about landing humans on the Moon,” he wrote on the Ozy website.

“To some, saying that we are returning to the Moon implies that we will be doing the same as we did 50 years ago. I want to be clear – that is not our vision.

“We are going to the Moon with innovative new technologies and systems to explore more locations across the surface than we ever thought possible. This time, when we go to the Moon, we will stay.”

Mr Bridenstine said that the ambitious plans would begin later this week, with partners from private industry and elsewhere invited to NASA headquarters in Washington DC to discuss the next generation of lunar landers.

So far, Nasa has already co-operated with nine companies to send cargo tot he Moon, with the ultimate goal being to develop landers that can take astronauts back there.

As a space fan, all I can say is that it’s about time. Way back in the 1970s and 1980s space experts and commenters, like Sir Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky At Night, were predicting that we’d have bases on the Moon and elsewhere in solar system by now. But that was before space budgets were drastically cut and NASA instead concentrated on the Space Shuttle. This was supposed to open space up to just about anybody who could afford the cost of a ticket and was in reasonable health. Its crews experienced 3Gs at lift-off, but this was considered to be so low that a 70-year old man could tolerate it. Unfortunately the Shuttle was massively overengineered and the Challenger disaster put the programme on hold while its causes were investigated and corrected. Even then its use remained risky, as we saw a few years ago when one disintegrated during re-entry over America and the programme was subsequently cancelled.

There were plans in the 1990s for a private, commercial return to the Moon, according to Focus Magazine, but that didn’t seem to get anywhere.

My guess is that NASA is finally getting round to putting a permanent human presence on the Moon not just because Trump fancies going back to the glory days of the Cold War space race, but because the EU and the Chinese are also planning the serious exploration of the Moon. A little while ago ESA – the European Space Agency – announced they were planning to put people on the Moon, while last week the Chinese successfully landed a probe on the Moon’s far side. The Chinese are putting such effort into their space programme that the quantum physicist and SF writer, Stephen Baxter, predicted back in the 1990s that the first person on Mars would probably be Chinese sometime in the next decade. Under Reagan, one of the big aerospace conglomerations and think tanks published a report arguing that America needed to develop its space technologies and industries, and move out onto the High Frontier, in order to secure its place as world leader. It’s likely that this is the same thinking behind this announcement by NASA.

As for exploring the next generation of lunar landers, I wonder if they’ll be able to use any data or blueprints remaining from the original lunar modules that landed Armstrong, Aldrin and co all those years ago. After the Apollo programme was cancelled, the massive Saturn 5 rockets were broken up, with the exception of those on display at the Kennedy Space Centre, and the plans destroyed. This has outraged many space scientists like John S. Lewis, the author of Mining the Sky, who compared it to the destruction of Chung He’s fleet by the Chinese eunuchs in the 14th century. Chung He was a Chinese admiral, who led a fleet of ships on an exploratory mission to the outside world, going as far as the Bight of Benin in West Africa. However, when he returned the eunuchs at the imperial court had his fleet destroyed and further exploration banned because they feared that opening the country up to foreign contact would have a destabilizing effect on its society. The result of this was that the country remained isolated and stagnated until it fell prey to foreign colonialism in the 19th century, most famously through the Opium Wars.

Hopefully NASA’s announcement will mark the beginning of a new, serious wave of interplanetary exploration which aims to put people on the Moon and other planets, as space scientists, engineers and SF fans and writers have been dreaming about and working towards since before the great German director Fritz Lang made his epic movie Die Frau im Mond (‘The Woman in the Moon’) about a German moon landing back in the 1920s.

In November last year, 2018, that redoubtable opponent on Fascism and Zionism Tony Greenstein put up an article attacking the Likud government and the Israeli state for trying to discourage mix marriage between Jews and Palestinians, entitled ‘Israel’s War on Interracial Relationships and Miscegenation’.

The article was provoked by the controversy in Israel over the marriage of Lucy Aharish, an Arab TV news presenter, and Tsahi Halevi, the star of the TV series Fauda. The marriage was denounced by Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and Oren Hazan, a Likud backbencher, as well as Yair Lapid, the head of the Centre Party, Yesh Atid. The article also reported how various Israeli towns, like Petah Tikva, have tried to stop Jews socializing or marrying with Palestinians. That municipality has set up a special team to tackle Jewish women dating Arab or ethnic minority men. In the East Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev a vigilante group of young men patrol the streets seeking to disrupt any romantic meetings between Jews and ethnic minorities. As well as Petah Tikvah, Tel Aviv and Kiryat Gat also have government sponsored campaigns to prevented racial mixing. There’s even a counselling programme for Jewish women in an interracial relationship, as well as phoneline for people to ring to inform on Jewish women going out with Palestinians. The religious organization, Yad L’ahim, also assists these campaigns with its Anti-Assimilation Department, which has produced a video for use with the police.

Back in 2011 Tzipi Hotoveli, in her role as Chair of the Status of Women Committee in the Knesset, invited the racist far-right party Lehava to speak on how marriages between Jews and non-Jews could be prevented. The Education Ministry under Naftali Bennett also removed two books from the English language curriculum, Borderlife and Trumpet in the Wadi in 2015 and 2016, because they were romances between Jews and Palestinians. The article also notes that there was a similar controversy over the marriage of another mixed couple, Morel Malka and Mahmud Mansour. Civil marriage does not exist in Israel, so Malka converted to her husband’s religion, Islam. The couple’s wedding ceremony was marked by a demonstration by Lehava, whose members screamed anti-Arab slogans, including ‘Death to the Arabs’.

The article concluded

Because for Zionists, mixed marriage is not so much a religious as a racial/national matter. Race in Israel is defined by religion, hence why inter-marriage is not so much considered a sin as a form of treason. That was what an opinion poll found in Yediot Aharanot. Over half Israeli Jews believe that marriage is ‘national treason’. ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’.

This stance against racial intermixing is very similar to that of Apartheid South Africa and the American south during segregation. And, although the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism states that it is anti-Semitic to draw comparisons between Jews and Nazis, it is also very similar to Nazi Germany. The Nazis also passed legislation to prevent intermarriage between Aryan Germans and those peoples they judged inferior, like Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Blacks.

Hitler himself stated his opposition to miscegenation in Mein Kampf, where he claimed that the Aryans had declined through interbreeding with the peoples they had conquered and colonized. He wrote in Mein Kampf

The Aryan races-often in absurdly small numbers-overthrow alien nations, and favoured by the numbers of people of lower grade who are at their disposal to aid them, they proceed to develop, according to the special conditions for life in the acquired territories-fertility, climate, etc., the qualities of intellect and organization which are dormant in them. In the course of a few centuries they create cultures originally stamped with their own character of the land and the people which they have conquered. As time goes on, however, the conquerors sin against the principle of keeping the blood pure (a principle which they adhered to at first) and begin to blend with the original inhabitants whom they have subjugated, and end their own existence as a peculiar people; for the sin committed in Paradise was inevitably followed by expulsion.

Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: Paternoster Row 1933) 121.

The Israeli state’s attempts to ban interracial romances and marriage is therefore exactly the same as that of South Africa, segregation America, and Hitler’s Germany, regardless of the IHRA’s attempt to rule out any discussion of it as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is part of the regime’s colonialist nature and subjection of the Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein has today put up on his blog a review of Karl Sabbagh’s The Anti-Semitism Wars: How the British Media Failed their Public, published by Skyscraper Publications. This is a full-scale attack on the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and particularly Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, as well as the Israel lobby, the Jewish establishment, including former Chief Rabbi and Fascist marcher Jonathan Sacks, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who have been its promoters. The contributors include not only Sabbagh, but also Tony Greenstein himself, Cyril Chilson, Tom Suarez, Eve Mykytun, and Kerry-Ann Mendoza. This is about the way the Israel lobby and its various organs and supporters have vilified and tried to silence perfectly decent, anti-racist people, like Mike, simply for the crime of legitimately criticizing Israel, or defending those who have. And absurdly, many of those who’ve been smeared have been Jewish, like Greenstein and Chilson, a former Israeli officer, now naturalized British academic.

The first chapter, by Sabbagh, describes the beginning of the smears and witch hunt with Gordon Brown’s urging the Labour party to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, the Zionist smears against Corbyn after he told two Zionist activists making a nuisance of themselves at a pro-Palestinian event that they didn’t understand the British sense of humour, and examining the role of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Jonathan Sacks in claiming that anti-Semitism was now on the rise in Britain.

Greenstein’s article covers his own suspension from the Labour party, but also argues that the anti-Semitism smears are part of concerted campaign by the Deep State. This is because the American, British and Israeli authorities see Corbyn as a threat. This campaign is being run through the Guardian, and particularly its columnist, Jonathan Freedland, who also writes for the Jewish Chronicle. Greenstein supports this claim by citing the book, Inside the Company about the CIA’s destabilization of South America by a former agent, Philip Agee. He also notes how the Beeb’s journo, John Tusa, also fronted stories from the Agency. He then goes on to describe the witch hunt against the Labour party in more detail.

Sabbagh is another victim of anti-Semitism smears. A medical journalist, his crime was to write an article describing the Deir Yassin massacre in 1981, just as a group of doctors were preparing to fly to Israel for the ‘medical Olympics’. Sabbagh wanted to warn people that the event may be held in an Israeli mental hospital, some of whose wards were the scene of the atrocity. He, the organization he worked for, and the medical journal which published the article were then subjected to a deluge of complaints and accusations of anti-Semitism chiefly from outraged Jewish doctors, beginning with the Israeli Medical Association.

This campaign of abuse, vilification and intimidation began again in 2008 against Dr Derek Summerfield when he dared to write an article in the British Medical Journal about the effects of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The campaign was organized by the Zionist lobby group, HonestReporting.

Chilson describes his persecution and suspension from the Labour party, because he dared to post comments criticizing Israel on Twitter. It shows just what a farcical kangaroo court the disciplinary panel hearing his case was. Members of the panel interrupted his testimony, threatened to throw him out, and then were astonished at the end when he refused to agree that the hearing was fair!

Suarez’s chapter describes how the Israel lobby tried to shut down his lecture tour promoting his 2016 book, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, describing atrocities by the Irgun and Lehi terrorist organisations. The campaign was joined and aided by the Israeli embassy and the Daily Heil, as well as the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Directors of British Jews.

The book also includes a piece on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism by Appeal Court Judge Sir Stephen Sedley making it very clear that it isn’t fit for purpose.

Eve Mykytun’s article is an expose of the tactics the Israel lobby uses to silence its critics. This shows how the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its founder and leader, Gideon Falter, lies to smear people, and grossly misuses and inflates statistics. The article examines two cases of people, who hold genuinely anti-Semitic views, who were prosecuted by the state at the instigation of the CAA. Another, genuine anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, also appears, who asks what Jewishness means if Israel is a Jewish state, as well as attacking Falter for ‘making his living from anti-Semitism accusations’.

Chapter 8 is a transcript of Al-Jazeera’s programme, The Lobby, which exposed Shai Masot at the Israeli plotting to decide who should be in the cabinet, and Joan Ryan in the Labour party making a false accusation of anti-Semitism against another member.

Chapter 9 is an interview by Kerry-Ann Mendoza of Stephen Orszczuk, the foreign editor of Jewish News, one of the newspapers that combined with the Jewish Chronicle and another rag to smear Corbyn. Oryszczuk criticized this vilification, and went on leave from the paper soon after.

Chapter 10 comprises a report from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct of the House of Lords about an accusation of anti-Semitism against Baroness Tonge. She had chaired a meeting at the Palestine Return Centre as part of a campaign to obtain an apology from Britain for the Balfour Declaration.

There are also several appendices. The first is a collection of quotes from prominent Zionists about gentiles, which would definitely be considered anti-Semitic if non-Jews had made them about Jews. The third is an extract from the Media Reform Coalition report, Labour, Anti-Semitism and the News.

Greenstein concludes his report by saying that is packed with information, making it and will be a handy reference to the anti-Semitism smear campaign which all activists should have, and giving details how it can be ordered from him through his paypal account.

This looks like a very thorough exposure of the malign lies and racism of the Israel lobby and their smears of decent, anti-racist men and women. I’ve no doubt that the campaign of persecution against Corbyn and his supporters is being done by the Deep State, as Corbyn’s support of the Palestinians challenges British colonial and post-colonial policies towards supporting Israel against the secular Arab states in the Middle East. And many journalists and researchers have demonstrated how the smear and vilification campaign against Israel’s critics are being directed by the Israeli state and its Office of Strategic Affairs.

And the Zionists are also deeply racist. Mike found that out when they smeared him. When they couldn’t get the better of him in an argument he had with them over the Net, they resorted to sneering and belittling him as a non-Jew. They are also viciously anti-Semitic towards those they consider to be ‘the wrong Jews’. People like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and Jackie Walker, who criticize Israel and follow the Bund’s line that Jews’ homelands are where they happen to live around the world with the non-Jewish peoples of that country. These Jews, who like Cyril Chilson may be the children of Holocaust survivors, are subject to the most disgusting abuse as ‘kapos’, and told that they and their families should have died in the Holocaust.

This is a book, which should be in the bookshops, instead of some of the mendacious books, like the one by a Zionist, that maintain the smears. But I doubt very much that it ever will be. The mere idea of this book being published at all is probably enough to send the Israel lobby, the Jewish press, the Board of Deputies and the corrupt British media establishment all howling with rage.

I fervently wish Karl Sabbagh, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Kerry-Ann Mendoza and everyone else who contributed to it all the very best, and hope that it enjoys excellent sales. May it lead to further exposes and demolitions of the Lobby, its vile undermining of our democracy and political parties, and its attempts to create division and fear between Jews and gentiles.

The I’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is one of the few Fleet Street columnists, who I respect. She writes about racism, but acknowledges that it is not confined to Whites hating Blacks, but affects people of all races and colours. She’s also a genuinely moderate Muslim, fiercely critical of the bigots and preachers of hate in her religion, and condemns the White, non-Muslim politicians who pander to them in the hope of garnering votes.

A few weeks ago, she attacked Tweezer for refusing sanctuary to Asia Bibi, the Christian Pakistani woman acquitted of blasphemy in Pakistan. Other companies have offered to take Bibi in, but not May, who feared that it would upset this country’s Muslims. Alibhai-Brown then described the case, showing how dubious the accusation was, and the prejudice and hatred Pakistani Christians face. She also stated that the country was also unsafe for Shi’a Muslims like herself. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had intended it to be a secular state with separation between state and mosque. But this had swiftly been overturned, most notoriously by the military dictator General Zia ul-Haqq, who ruled the place in the 1970s. Everything she said was correct. The Beeb has also screened documentaries about the arrests of people in Pakistan for blasphemy. It’s a crime that carries the death penalty, and Bibi has spent over a decade on death row. Most of those accused, however, are Muslims, and it looks very much like the majority of accusations are false, being used as a weapon in family and clan disputes. In the case of Bibi, she was accused of blasphemy by a group of women with whom she was working. They sent her to fetch water for them to drink. She stopped to take a drink herself, so they accused her of ‘polluting’ it before going to accuse her of blasphemy. Everything about it says to me that this is all about caste. Islam in Pakistan has a caste system like India, though not as severe. Many of Pakistan’s Christians are sheikhs, one of the lowest castes, working as bonded labourers in the brick kilns. It looks like Bibi was one of these low caste workers, and the Muslims for whom she fetched the water were outraged at her taking a drink from it because they believed that the touch of a low caste person polluted it. Just like high caste Indians at one time would throw away their food if even the shadow of one of the Dalits, the Untouchables, fell on it.

There’s more to be said about the case, but Alibhai-Brown was right to attack the vicious, murderous bigotry behind the accusation and Tweezer’s own cowardice in refusing to give Bibi asylum. I’d go further, and say that while there is a danger that the preachers of hate in British Islam would try to capitalize on Bibi being given asylum, that’s no evidence for not admitting her to Britain. And it also shows Tweezer’s low view of British Islam, if she thought the intolerance of bigoted minority was worth capitulating to. Not all Muslims are fanatics and bigots by any means, but Tweezer’s refusal to take in Asia Bibi suggests that she feels that nevertheless, enough of them are. It’s a decision which would delight the Islamophobes, who believe that all Muslims are a threat to traditional British religious freedom, and that liberal governments are too afraid to confront them.

Alibhai-Brown on Israel’s Persecution of the Palestinians

In yesterday’s I for the 27th November 2018, Alibhai-Brown tackled the plight of the Palestinians and their oppression under the Israelis in an article entitled ‘The Holy Land needs some goodwill: Plight of the Palestinians should be remembered by all’, on page 15. She began the article by stating that Christmas is the time when devout Christians turn their minds to the places where Christ lived, preached and died, and that there is a massive tourist industry in the Holy Land. It is a country which contains sites sacred to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that for centuries the religions coexisted in peace.

This is true no longer, as Israel increases its dominance. She states that Bethlehem has been turned into an open air prison, and that last year Palestinian Muslims were denied entrance to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Netanyahu’s oppression of the Palestinians is supported by Donald Trump and American Christian fanatics, whose decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem shows that Muslim Arabs mean nothing to him and his government.

Shalhoub-Kavorkian and Dimbleby on Oppressed Palestine

She then goes on to quote Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kavorkian of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the routine brutality and second class status of the Palestinians. The prof. wrote

Violence is central to the political logic of the Israeli state and its occupation of Jerusalem. Enacted in the hundreds of daily acts of harassment perpetuated by heavily armed soldiers, police, settlers, and undercover security personnel belonging to the state of Israel, much of the violence occurs routinely and it goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Palestinians, native to and residing in Jerusalem, are categorized by Israeli law as ‘permanent residents’ or as foreign residents who hate to prove to the Ministry of Interior that their ‘centre of life’ – where they live, go to school, get medical care and pay for utilities are all taking place in Jerusalem.

She then moves on to discuss a ‘poignant’ book on Palestine, published by Jonathan Dimbleby, now the presenter of Question Time in 1980. This was when he was the maker of foreign documentaries, and the book was accompanied with photographs by Sir Donald McCullin. The book apparently shows the great diversity of Palestinian life and culture as well as moving tales of dispossession and pain. Re-reading it now, she realized how much worse their plight had become. She quotes the book as saying

The struggle is still presented in a woefully lopsided fashion: a small embattled, occasionally obstinate but usually admirable democratic state (Israel) under challenge from a despicable, occasionally pathetic, but usually brutal gang of desperadoes (the PLO).

Defending Palestine and Anti-Semitism Smears

She is very aware that simply discussing the plight of the Palestinians is met by accusations of anti-Semitism. She writes

Now the reporting of Israeli injustices brings on instant accusations of anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, she also swallows the line that Israel was created in response to the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t. Jewish colonization began long before, after the Balfour Declaration during the First World War. She states that Israel exists and must exist as a safe homeland, before going to make the point that the horrors of the Nazis’ persecution don’t give Israel the right to break international laws and violate the human rights ‘of those whose land was taken to create their homeland’.

Pro-Palestinian Pilgrimage to Jerusalem

The article then goes on to discuss the book, Walking to Jerusalem, by Justin Butcher, a playwright and activist, whose launch she attended. This is the record of a pilgrimage made by hundreds of ordinary people, who went on foot to Jerusalem, funded by a small charity, the Amos Trust. The pilgrims arrived just before the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, in order to ‘change the record of a hundred years of injustice to the Palestinian people.’ She states that the marchers included Jews, which should surprise no-one, who knows how very many Jews are critical of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and the crimes committed in their name by Netanyahu’s thugs.

She also notes that over 200 Gazans were killed by Israeli forces, some of whom were medical workers and journalists. Settlers were stealing more land and homes. Although some Israelis were also wounded and killed, and too many live in fear, this was an unequal clash.

Alibhai-Brown’s Call for the Public to Contact their MPs

She concludes the article

Maybe one thing we can all do this Christmas is to ask our MPs to be more openly critical of Israel and do what the walkers did – support peaceful Palestinian men, women and children who have for so long been denied rights, livelihoods and dignity. Sometimes goodwill is the best present.

Alibhai-Brown and the Anti-Semitism Smears against the Labour Party

It’s a good article, but marred by Alibhai-Brown’s own behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. When the Israel lobby and Conservative media and Jewish establishment once again attacked Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour for not signing up to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, Alibhai-Brown was one of the hacks denouncing the Labour party as full of anti-Semites. But this article suggests she know how false at least some of those allegations must have been. But there is no retraction. The Fleet Street Groupthink about the Labour party, and the bias of the I’s editor and proprietor apparently appear to be too strong.

She also must realise that with the Israel lobby holding power in both the Tories and the Labour party through their ‘Friends of Israel’ groups, and the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour party, any chance of MPs stepping out of line to risk their careers defending the Palestinians is remote. Not while there’s a chance that someone at the Israeli embassy will pick up where Shai Masot left off and start deciding that they’re a person, who shouldn’t be in the next cabinet. And although the media may claim that the affair’s all over, their haste to do so shows that the conspiracy – and the accusations of anti-Semitism against people like Mike who correctly called it that – has had the desired effect. MPs aren’t going to risk being sidelined or thrown out as anti-Semites if they dare confront the lobby.

The Israel Lobby and the Suppression of Pro-Palestinian Reporting

As for Dimbleby and his book, I very much doubt there’s much chance of anyone at the Beeb now being so courageous in criticizing Israel. Ten years ago Peter Oborne made his documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches. This showed not just the extent of the lobby in the parliamentary parties, but also how they bullied and intimidated journalists with accusations of anti-Semitism. This included Graoniad editor Alan Rusbridger, and several very well respected Beeb journos, who dared to describe the atrocities committed by Israel and the massacres by its allies, the Lebanese Christian phalange, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. These accusations were found by the broadcasting regulatory bodies to be without foundation. But that tactic is still being used by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the other thugs and bully-boys in the Israel lobby.

And this tactics will continue to be made, unless more people stand up to it. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t anti-Semites, but they were smeared as such simply because they defended the Palestinians. The Israelis are afraid that there just might be a foreign prime minister, who doesn’t defer to them, and won’t tolerate their persecution of the indigenous Arabs. Alibhai-Brown must surely realise this, but she joined their attacks on Corbyn and Labour anyway.

And those attacks on Corbyn and politicians like him will continue, unless journos like Alibhai-Brown practice what they preach and actively support and defend him and other Israel-critical politicos in their columns against such mendacious and false accusation of anti-Semitism.

I found this short clip of Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA, speaking at a debate held at Georgetown University. He was answering questions about his view that America should not support Israel.

The panel are incredulous at this, and raise the old canard about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East.

He makes it clear that he believes that America should be indifferent to whether Israel survives, and that democracy is a silly foreign policy goal. This has been proved in Afghanistan. Against the response that democracies are less likely to wage war on democracies, he replies that he spent four years when two of the world’s greatest democracies managed to kill 640,000 of their own people. He states that democracies will fight like other people, but it is not the business of the US to install democracy anywhere. ‘We don’t do it very well. We do it ridiculously badly as a matter of fact.’ He goes on to say that it is a canard that countries have a right to exist. No, they have a right to defend themselves.

He then denies the charge that Israel and its representatives corrupt US politics. No, it’s Israel-supporting Americans who do that. As for his evidence for this, he points to what they did to Ambassador Freeman. The panel states that that was not corruption, it was a lobby doing what a lobby does. The panel then compares the Israel lobby to the tobacco lobby and the gun lobby. And Scheuer replies by saying that none of these lobbies rebound to America’s harm, while the Israel lobby does exactly that. They then ask him about the harm the Israel lobby has done. Scheuer responds by saying that they have convinced Americans that Israeli interests are identical with US national security interests. When the chairman of the panel says that a lot of people would agree with that, Scheuer says bluntly that a lot of people are foolish, and leading America into defeat.

I think Scheuer’s an old school American Conservative of the type who believes that America has no business telling other countries how to run their affairs. It’s classic isolationism. He isn’t alone. One of the American servicewomen voicing this objection was a senior Pentagon officer, who despise the Neocons for dragging America into a series of pointless wars in the Middle East.

And no, America is not good at installing democracies. It has always instead installed Fascist dictatorships. The democracies it has installed, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are artificial and very dependent on continued US military support.

As for Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East, that’s rubbish. Lebanon is also a democracy, though very carefully limited in a system of consociality, so that the different religions occupy particular posts in a very careful balancing of sectarian power. Iran’s a theocracy, but it’s people also vote in elections, so it has a democratic component. The democracy the Neocons wanted to bring to Iraq was similarly limited, in that they wanted the only parties to gain power to be those standing for complete free trade, low taxes, and so on. The constitution the Americans imposed on Iraq has written into it that the Iraqis’ own oil industry cannot be nationalized. It has remain in private hands. Which means those of the western multinationals. And Israel itself is very dubious as a democracy. The Palestinians are very much second-class citizens and the Israeli state only acts on behalf of the European and American Jewish colonists.

And it should be absolutely axiomatic – a clear, fundamental true political principle – that one major reason why so much of the Arab and Muslim world hates America has absolutely nothing to do with hatred of democracy or western civilization per se, but because America backs Israel, the persecution of that nation’s indigenous Arab and Muslim population, and invades and plunders other Arab and Islamic states.

Scheuer’s a brave man for pointing all this out, and I’m surprise the Israel lobby hasn’t smeared him as an anti-Semite. Perhaps they have. But he’s right. As are all the other decent critics of Israel, that the country and its foreign lobbies have smeared.

This is a video that the Blairites, the Israel lobby, the Tories and the lamestream media really don’t want you to see. It’s the kind of video that would have Marlon Solomon, Maggie Cousins and the entire Board of Deputies of British Jews screaming ‘anti-Semitism!’ Not because it is – it isn’t – but simply because it shows the reality of what’s happening in Israel to the indigenous people. They’re having their homes demolished.

The video’s just less than five minutes long, and features host Dena Takruri walking through the Bedouin village of al-Zarnoug in the Negev desert, talking to one of its people, Basma Abo Qwedir. The village has existed since before Israel was founded in 1948, but the Israeli authorities don’t consider that it legitimately exists, and so have attempted to demolish it and forcibly relocate its people many times. And although its people are considered Israeli citizens, Abo Qwedir makes it very clear that she doesn’t believe this is remotely true. If she’s an Israeli, she says, then she’s a second- or third class one. The country doesn’t treat her as other citizens, such as Jews, for example.

The video states that al-Zarnoug is one of 35 unrecognized Arab villages in the desert with a total population of 70,000 people. They’ve been under threat of eviction since the Nakba of Palestine’s destruction through the foundation of Israel in 1948. In 2013 a bill was proposed for the villages’ demolition and the removal of its people to government-built townships. In some cases, the villages would be replaced by Jewish settlements. The Israeli authorities said they would shelve the plan after widespread protests, but the home demolitions have continued, including in al-Zarnoug.

As shown, it appears to be a village of grim, breeze-block and concrete housing. If the residents need to build new buildings, they have to be hidden behind corrugated iron sheeting, because if they go to the authorities for a building permit, it won’t be issued. The roads and thoroughfares are simply the bare soil. And before AJ+ visited the village, the Israelis demolished houses in the nearby village of El Araqid for the 90th time. Abo Qwedir explains that as the village doesn’t officially exist, it means that they don’t have electricity, infracture, playgrounds, sewage and roads as they should. She shows Takruri how the villagers get electricity from solar panels on their houses, which they can move to follow the sun. But in winter and rainy days when there is no sun, they have to rely on batteries.

Takruri states that Israel regards the development of the Negev desert as one of its most important goals, and the ministry of foreign affairs says that the country seeks to integrate villagers into its development plans. But residents like Ab Qwedir read between the lines that the government wishes to replacement them with Jews, because Arabs, Palestinians, ‘are not welcome here’.

The video concludes with Abo Qwedir saying that simply staying there is a form of resistance against the Israeli state. Everyone does it, she says. ‘Sometimes it’s against the wind, other times it’s against the state.’

The demolition of Arab homes has been a major issue for decades now, and many Israelis support the Arabs in the determination to stay in their homes. Jews, including rabbis, have campaigned against the house demolitions. From what I’ve read, the Israeli colonization of the Negev presents the Israeli state with a problem. As it stands at the moment, the desert’s very largely Arab in population, so that some Israelis have said that they feel the territory is ‘lost’. For Israel to settle the region with Jews, it will have to withdraw or abandon some Jewish settlements elsewhere, such as the Occupied Territories. Which will enrage the settlers there, who believe that as part of Eretz Israel, the West Bank should be firmly part of Israel and its indigenous people cleansed.

And this is probably part of the explanation why Israel is so keen to tell western Diaspora Jews that they’re not safe in Europe and America, and exploit every terrorist outrage, like the Pittsburgh shooting two weeks ago, to spread fear and encourage Jewish Americans and Europeans to move to Israel for their own safety. In Britain this led to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism making the absurd and odious claim that Jews were facing the biggest rise in anti-Semitism since the 1930s. Hardly. This statement was so obviously wrong, that even one of the Jewish papers or organisations had to step in to show that it was utterly false.

It’s for sticking up for the people of Palestine against the destruction of their homes and their treatment as second-class citizens, that decent people like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, Ken Livingstone and Mike, as well as Jeremy Corbyn himself, have been vilified as anti-Semites and worse by the Blairites, the Israel lobby and a corrupt, Tory media.

It’s because they’re afraid of a genuinely socialist Labour party getting into power, which really does support racial equality and dignity. As against the Blairites, the Neocons, and the Tories, who stand for imperialism, colonialism and war without end to promote Israel, western and Saudi oil interests, and the seizure of other nations’ state enterprises and oil reserves, for the benefit of the multinationals.

I found this video from RT which was posted yesterday, Wednesday 21st November 2018 on YouTube. It reports that the Quakers have banned investing in companies which profit through Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The Quakers stated that

Our long history of working for a just peace in Palestine and Israel has opened our eyes to the many injustices and violations of international law arising from the military occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government.

With the occupation now in its 51st year, and with no end in sight, we believe we have a moral duty to state publicly that we will not invest in any company profiting from the occupation.

This is, apparently, the first time a British church had made such a move, and the Quakers have been criticized by Jewish groups, which claim that it is a reference to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement. the Board of Deputies of British Jews called the Quakers decision ‘appalling’ and said that it must be reversed. Quaker leaders, however, state that the decision recalls protests against apartheid South Africa and the slave trade.

The video then moves into a discussion about the decision with Les Levido from Jews For Boycotting Israeli Goods and Rafi Bloom, co-chair of Northwest Friends of Israel.

The Quakers are, of course, absolutely right. Israel is an apartheid state, and the West Bank is under military occupation. The Quakers are rightly famous for their pacifism. One of our aunts was a member of CND in the 1980s, and I got the impression that among the religious groups supporting the movement were the Quakers and Roman Catholic Franciscan friars. As for the Slave Trade, they were one of the main groups behind the Abolitionist movement when it first appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries. One of the great Quaker campaigners against it in the British Caribbean was Woolmer, a hunchbacked dwarf, who used to carry around with him a hollowed-out Bible filled with blood. When he saw a planter approaching, he used to stab the knife into the Bible, sending the blood spattering as a visual protest of the blood spilt through the infamous trade. Philadelphia, the city founded by another Quaker, William Penn, was also the home of many of the American Quaker campaigners against the slave trade. Later on they were joined by the Methodists and the evangelical wing of the Anglican church in Britain. I’ve also got a feeling that many Quakers may also have been involved in the legalization of homosexuality in Britain. Gerard Hoffnung, the musician and cartoonist, was a Quaker and a supporter of this movement to end the persecution of gays.

It’s to be expected that Jewish groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews were going to be outraged at the church’s decision, but I note that the reporter does not say that they denounced them as anti-Semites. As the Quaker’s have always promoted peace and tolerance, such an accusation simply wouldn’t be credible.

I haven’t watched the debate, however, because I’ve no respect for the North West Friends of Israel. From reading Bookburnersrus, Martin Odoni’s and Tony Greenstein’s blogs, it’s very clear that they’re another bunch of thuggish bully-boys. Martin describes a meeting at a Quaker meeting house in Manchester, when the Jewish American reporter and activist Max Blumenthal was speaking about his latest book on Israel and its crimes. The Zionist activists there first tried to stop him entering, and then loudly heckled, sneered and guffawed throughout his talk until they were finally turfed out by the rozzers. And of course, they made the ridiculous claim that they were being silenced because they were Jews, when in fact they were thrown out because they were just there to disrupt and prevent other Jews talking and hearing about what was really going on.

Tony Greenstein described some of their members in one of his blogs. At least two were failed businessmen, one of whom was a lawyer, who’d been struck off. Quite apart from the usual contingent of Islamophobes and supporters of the EDL. They’re in no position to lecture the Quakers or the Jewish Israel-critical peeps, who have to suffer their anti-Semitic abuse, about morality.

The day before that report, the 21st, RT posted another piece discussing Airbnb’s decision not to list homes in the occupied West Bank, which also enraged the Israeli state. The company’s press room stated

We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.

About 200 homes were to be removed from the list. The Palestinian authority welcomed the move, as they had previously requested the company to remove such listings. The Israelis, however, condemned it, and used the time-worn tactic of screaming racism.

Yariv Levin, the Israeli tourism minister, declared

This decision is completely unacceptable. This is pure discrimination, something that is taken only against Jews that are living in Judaea and Samaria. This is actually a racist decision – and more than that, I do believe that it is a double standard that is taken only against Israel, against Jews that are living here in Israel.

The anchorwoman then goes on to talk to Mustafa Barghouti, the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, about the issue, as well as a former commander in the Israeli air force. Barghouti states that the UN resolutions say that the settlements in the West Bank are completely illegal, they are discriminatory, as they are built on land stolen from the Palestinians, and any relationship with these illegal settlements are a violation of international law. He says that Airbnb has taken the right decision, as they stood to lose a lot due to the boycott against them. And what is really racist and discriminatory is the apartheid system the Israelis have created, which favours Israelis over Palestinians.

The Israeli spokesman, Reuven Berko, cited simply as ‘Middle East expert’, rants about Airbnb being ‘cowards to Islamic terrorists, I don’t know what’, accuses them of anti-Semitism and ignoring the right of the Jews to their homeland in Judea and Samaria and asks how many Christians are angry about this. He states that this is an awful step against history, against fate.

It’s the usual specious rubbish. The Biblical state of Israel certainly existed, and was the homeland of the Jewish people in antiquity. But it has not existed for centuries. For many Jews, their real homeland was the country in which they and their forebears had lived in the Diaspora. And the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement, made that very clear in their slogan ‘Wherever we live, that’s our homeland’. And many Orthodox Jews feel that Israel cannot be restored except by the hand of the Almighty and the Messiah. Until that happens, modern Israel is to them nothing but a blasphemy.

As for appealing to Christian anger about this, the lead Christian Zionist movements, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, are millennialists, who believe that the restoration of Israel will usher in the End Times and Christ’s Second Coming, along with the destruction of those Jews, who won’t convert to Christianity. In fact, the indigenous Christians of Palestine have almost been completely cleansed from Israel. The Christian population before 1948 was 25 per cent. Now it’s only one per cent. American Zionist Christians put this down wholly to persecution from Muslims. Now Muslim Palestinians have persecuted their Christian fellow countrymen, whom they see as collaborators. But Palestinian Christians have also and are being persecuted by the Israeli state and the settlers. The Israelis have closed churches as well as mosques, and both churches and mosques have been attacked and desecrated by mobs of Israeli settlers.

In my somewhat limited experience, Muslim Brits are better informed about this than British Christians. I studied Islam when I was at College as part of my Religious Studies minor degree. I can remember reading the equivalent of the parish magazine from one of the British mosques. It contained an article attacking the closure of one of the mosques in Palestine and its conversion into a disco. The article also noted that a nearby Christian church had also been closed by the Israelis.

A few years ago Channel 4 also screened a programme about the relationship between Christianity and other faiths, in which the presenter travelled to Israel. There he encountered an Israeli ‘shock jock’ radio host, who ranted about Christians. The programme also covered a march of militant Israelis on a church used by Messianic Jews. These are Jews, who have accepted Christ as the messiah, but still observe the Mosaic Law. This is my opinion, but I think they’re very similar to the Christian community of which the Gospel writer St. Matthew was a part, as this is traditionally regarded as the Jewish Gospel, and St. Matthew is concerned to assimilate Christ’s teaching to that of the Jewish sages. The settlers were stopped at the church entrance by the Muslim doorman. And apparently, it was actually quite common to have Muslims at the door of Christian churches protecting the worshippers from religious violence from outside.

And if we are going to talk about racism and discrimination, a friend of mine, who studied Judaism at College also told me that in the 1960s the Israelis threw out tens of thousands of indigenous Jewish Palestinians, because they were culturally Arab. There have been articles in Counterpunch by the magazine’s Jewish contributors, which have pointed out that Israel is a European/American Jewish colony, whose founders had a despicable racist contempt for the Mizrahim, Jewish Arabs, or Arabicized Jews.

The Quakers and Airbnb are right to boycott Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And the real racism and apartheid is by Israel against the indigenous Arabs, who have been Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and have suffered discrimination, persecution and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state.

Facebook has been accused recently of censorship and pulling down masses of left-wing and alternative sites. In this video, RT America reports on Facebook’s censorship of a film by Groaniad columnist, George Monbiot for Double Down Media, on the crimes of the British Empire and Columbus’ genocide of the Amerindians. RT’s reporter states that it disproved the claim that the West’s conquests were less barbaric than others.

This is then followed by a piece from movie, in which Monbiot explains that before Columbus landed in the New World, there were 100 million native Americans. By the 19th century, there were less than one million. It was a policy deliberately endorsed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of the necessity of wiping out Native American peoples.

There then follows a Tweet from Double Down News reporting how Facebook had taken down the movie for ‘violating community standards’. The company states that it was a work of serious journalism which had gather 1 million views. The company was given no right of appeal or any reason for censorship. Why, they ask, is Facebook censoring history?

This came after Facebook took 800 pages they claimed were posting spam. They also used that excuse to pull down other alternative sites, like police watchdog groups and a fan page for RT correspondent Rachel Blevins. Monbiot himself tweeted that he thought the company’s banning of the Columbus film was a one-off, but now it appears to be part of a purge of dissenting posts.

The piece’s host then turns to interview George Galloway in London, asking him if this latest act of censorship by Facebook will lead to more people paying attention to the story.

Galloway replies that it sounds like a great video, and that he’ll try and see if he can go and see it somewhere, observing that the book they try to ban always goes to the top of the bestseller lists. Hopefully this will backfire on Facebook. He goes on to say that he himself has about a million and a half followers on social media, and because he is so well-known, he always thought he’d be invulnerable to this kind of thing. But George Monbiot is a very famous journalist and something of an insider in the British establishment, and now it’s happened to him. He states that it is quite intolerable that Facebook, a private company, can take an anti-commercial decision – which it is, if the movie had a million views – based on the political view of censoring history. And he states that he’s always known that British imperial history is censored from schooldays onward. We’re taught all about the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, but never about the crimes of imperialism.

The programme’s presenter states that there is an irony there, as Monbiot’s film touched on the way that history has been censored, and then Facebook does it all over again. Galloway replies that some of this censorship will be accidents, performed by some machine or factotum somewhere striking down something that casts an unfortunate light on the proprietors. It may be reinstated. But the general pattern seems to be that Facebook has become an adjunct of the Deep State in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, and that Deep State is bent on suppressing dissident views. This should open up a space for capitalism to work, of it works as it’s claimed to, for new Facebooks to come online, because after all it’s just a noticeboard. He hopes that the laws of commercial reality will reassert themselves. And people will know that if there’s a million views for Monbiot’s video, that’s a market not just an audience, and we’ll have to wait and see what emerges.

The host then goes on to ask him to talk about the crimes of western civilization and the British Empire which he thinks are overlooked. Galloway responds by saying the one she’s just discussed, about the massacre of nearly 100 million native Americans, is fairly hard to beat. ‘That is a Holocaust with a double capital ‘H”. But, he continues, the British Empire was committing crimes well into his own lifetime. We were shooting down Yemenis in Aden in the Crater(?) district when the Beatles were No. 1; we were shooting down Irish people on the streets of the Six Counties in the North of Ireland when the Beatles had been gone for several years. British imperial crimes are almost without number. He quotes his Irish grandfather as saying that the sun never set on the British Empire as God would never trust them in the dark. He goes on to say that the crimes of the British Empire continue to this day, in Yemen and Syria. Galloway describes the Kenyan examples, which Monbiot discusses in his film, as ‘quite extraordinary’. In Kenya and Malaya we were paying British servicemen a bounty for coming in with the heads of rebels, who were fighting for their own countries’ freedom from the British Empire. ‘And they talk about savages’.

It’s astonishing that Facebook should censor Monbiot’s video. I haven’t seen it, and don’t know anything about it except what is said here. But it seems to be well-established, uncontroversial fact. Columbus’ landing in the Americas did lead to the genocide of the Native American peoples. This was through exposure to European diseases, to which they had no immunity, enslavement and being worked to death. And what Columbus and the Spanish did the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean is truly horrific. They were worked to death producing gold. If they didn’t produce enough, they were mutilated. Their hands were cut off and hung round their necks. Indigenous women were raped by the conquistadors, and beaten if they didn’t show themselves to be sufficiently enthusiastic about pleasing their masters. Quite apart from the murder of their priests and aristocracy as pagans.

As for what the British did in Kenya, that can be read about in books like Africa’s Secret Gulags, amongst other books. I’ve posted reviews here from Lobster of more recent books discussing more recent British covert actions aimed at subverting nationalist movements and the democratic process in the former British colonies.

Facebook’s censorship of dissident and oppositional pages is a threat to the new freedoms of information that the internet has brought. Alternative news shows like Sam Seder’s Majority Report are discussing the possibility that the Net should be brought into government ownership in order to preserve it from interference and censorship by private corporations. I’m not sure this would do much good, as it would leave the American government able to censor it, in the same way that Blair, Sarkozy and Berlusconi used their power to censor and control information and news on state television. But I don’t think there can be much doubt now that Facebook and other big internet corporations are censoring news very much in concert with the demands of the Conservative elite and Deep State.